Category: News

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• YouTube increased the price of its live OTT service YouTube Live by 30% to $64.99. (Read more)

Music

• Spotify rolled out its $12.99/mo “Duo” discount bundle for two users at the same address in the US, India, and 53 other markets. (Read more)
  • Discount plans like the Family and Student plans and this Duo bundle have helped fuel Spotify’s premium subscriber growth over the last three years to 130M. ARPU for subscribers has declined each year due to that and to lower pricing in new markets (€4.72 avg in 2019).
     
• HIFI, a platform for musicians to better manage royalty collection and analysis, launched publicly and announced MUSIC (the music-focused fund of Matt Pincus and LionTree), Lerer Hippeau, and Flybridge Capital as initial investors. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Koji, a San Diego-based startup whose platform enables users to make and share interactive selfies, memes, and games over social media, raised $10M from Galaxy Interactive, Bitkraft Esports Ventures, MTG, Mark Pincus, and Michael Eisner. (Read more)
   
• Voicemod, a Spain-based startup providers voice filters to gamers to change their voice in in-game chat, raised $8M in funding from BitKraft Esports Ventures and others. The company has 2.5M MAUs and a team of 55. (Read more)
   
• MyRemoteApp, the Polish startup behind cloud gaming platform Vortex.gg, raised €2M from Deutsche Telekom. (Read more)
   
• Relentless Studios, the Amazon-owned studio building a big MMO called Crucible, pulled Crucible back into a closed beta to make improvements after an underwhelming launch. It’s a setback for Amazon’s gaming ambitions. (Read more)
   
• Tencent is opening a new studio in LA called Lightspeed that is building a game for Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X. (Read more)

AR/VR

• Google acquired North, the Waterloo-based maker of AR glasses Focals. Focals will discontinue its product line and app. (Read more)
   
• Niantic, the AR gaming studio behind Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is partnering with immersive theatre company Punchdrunk (creators of Sleep No More) for a series of immersive experiences. (Read more)
   
• Facebook made voice commands available as a beta feature for Oculus Quest users in the US. (Read more)

Communications

• Discord raised $100M in Series G funding at a roughly $3.5B valuation from Index Ventures and other investors as it pushes beyond gaming to be a broader group conversation hub. (Read more)

Other

• Willa, a Stockholm-based fintech startup by former Spotify staff that advances freelancers the money owed to them from clients and tech platforms, raised $3M in seed funding from EQT Ventures, Nordic Makers, and Moonfire Ventures. They are initially focused on social media influencers with an average following of 100,000 people. (Read more)

This was originally published in today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Hi everyone – I spoke with Starz CEO Jeffrey Hirsch about his strategy for expanding the longtime premium cable network into SVOD in the US and abroad, including user acquisition, pricing, and content localization efforts. Here’s the interview on TechCrunch.

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Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• SpringHill Co., the entertainment company led by basketball star LeBron James and his business partner Maverick Carter whose holdings are the SpringHill film/TV production co, the Uninterrupted media brand, and the Robot Co. marketing agency, raised $100M from Elisabeth Murdoch, Guggenheim Partners, the University of California endowment, and SC.Holdings. (Read more)
   
• YouTube is beta testing a feature for creators to post 15-second videos like on TikTok. (Read more)
   
• Spire Animation Studios, a new animated film studio, raised seed funding from the new CAA-affiliated VC firm Connect Ventures and entertainment law firm Ziffren Brittenham. (Read more)
   
• The Sundance Film Festival will be spread across 21 different cities next January instead of taking place only in Park City, UT as usual. (Read more)
   
• NENT raised its 2020 new subscriber target for Nordic SVOD service Viaplay from 400k to 600k. It finished 2019 with 2.3M subs and added 200k in Q1. (Read more)

Publishing

• The New York Times withdrew from Apple‘s Apple News subscription bundle. (Read more)
   
• Great Hill Partners acquired the subscription-based stock media marketplace Storyblocks. (Read more)

Music

• Artlist, an Israel-based platform for companies and independent creators to access royalty-free music, raised $48 million from PE firm KKR. (Read more)
  • Artlist is a competitor to Stockholm-based, EQT-backed platform Epidemic Sound.
     
• Soundtrack Your Brand, the Stockholm-based music streaming service for businesses (that spun out of Spotify in 2013), overhauled its cap table in recent months, per a story by Swedish startup publication Breakit. (Read more, in Swedish)
  • Tension over a focus on rapid growth and/or seeking a sale (preferred by Spotify and investors like Balderton, DIG, Industrifonden, and Northzone) vs. a focus on improving margins (preferred by management) led to new (Miami-based) investor Rokk3r investing for a 37% stake at a $34M valuation, half its prior valuation.
  • The co-founders’ stake and Spotify’s stake were diluted from 15% to about 3.5%, with an option plan getting the founders back to 14% based on performance.
  • 2019 financials were $12M in revenue (+20% yoy) with a $8.8M loss.

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Tencent is beta testing a new live streaming platform in the US to compete with Twitch, called Trovo. (Check it out)
   
• Roblox surpassed $1.5B in player spending over its mobile app, including $102M in May. The vast majority of revenue comes from users in the US and with iOS devices. (Read more)
   
• Roblox partnered with Warner Bros and DC to create a virtual world in Roblox modeled on Wonder Woman’s home island. (Read more)
   
• Focus Home Interactive, the French publisher behind World War Z that earned €13M in profit on €143 in revenue over the last year, acquired German studio Deck13 for €7M. (Read more)

Other

• Mirror, the interactive fitness video startup that sells a subscription to video workout classes delivered through an at-home wall-mounted device (with a mirror), is getting acquired by Canadian fitness apparel maker Lululemon for $500M. (Read more)

Communications

• Facebook opened up fan subscriptions to any creator in the US, UK, and several other markets. The feature lets creators with Facebook pages charge a $4.99 per month membership that paywalls exclusive content, gives fans a membership badge alongside their posts, and other perks. (Read more)
  • Niche creators are key to Facebook succeeding in its effort to orient Facebook around private interactions and membership in shared interest groups. For creators to devote themselves to community building on the platform, the monetization options have to be more lucrative than just a rev-share on ad revenue. 
  • Social platforms are wary of creators wanting to own their audience and drive fans to their websites or sites like Patreon, Substack, etc. so they are building similar features (while still not giving creators access to fans’ contact info, ensuring they stay beholden to the platform.)
  • I outlined the growing competition between leading social platforms to allow creators to directly monetize their fans in my February 2019 series on Patreon.
     
• TikTok has been monitoring what iOS users with its app copy to their device’s clipboard when they’re not using the app, per cybersecurity researchers Mysk. The same issue was reported in February for Android devices, with TikTok saying that was due to a faulty Android update. (Read more)
   
• Unilever and Verizon are among a wave of giant companies pulled their advertising from Facebook temporarily in protest of the amount of hate speech on the platform. (Read more)
   
• Cox Communications, the US telecom, launched an internet plan specifically for gamers that promises lower latency in response times to gaming-related servers. (Read more)
  • Perhaps the start of a trend?

Dealmakers

• CAA and the VC firm NEA have formed a new $100M VC fund called Connect Ventures targeting media-tech startups. (Read more)
  • It’s the latest of many attempts by Hollywood’s top talent agencies to succeed in VC and seems most similar to the Mailroom Fund (2008-11) that William Morris launched with Accel and Venrock.
     
• MCH Group, the financially troubled Swiss parent company of art fair Art Basel, is reportedly in talks with James and Rupert Murdoch to sell a 30% stake for $105 million. (Read more)

This originally appeared in today’s Monetizing Media newsletter. Sign up here.

(This is from today’s newsletter. You can subscribe here.)

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Tencent is acquiring Iflix, a leading VOD service in Southeast Asia and the Middle East with 25M MAUs across 13 markets. (Read more)
  • The Kuala Lumpur-based company raised $348M in outside funding since 2014. It’s IPO in Sydney was canceled when the market crashed due to Covid-19.
  • Variety reports the acquisition price is in the “tens of millions” which is a steep cut from prior valuations.
     
• FuboTV added ESPN and ABC channels to its OTT subscription. The addition of ESPN is a huge win for Fubo, which has anchored itself in live sports content. (Read more)
   
• Disney says Disney+ will expand to 8 more European countries on Sept 15 with prices in the €7-8 range depending on country. (Read more)
   
• Snap announced an interactive, shoppable show on Snapchat. (Read more)
   
• Pixellot, an Israel-based provider of automated video production technology for sporting events, raised $16M from Shamrock Capital and other investors. (Read more)
   
• NENT Group and Finland’s Elisa Viihde are forming a JV to combine SVOD offerings in Finland. (Read more)

Music

• Saban Music Group, the music group announced last July with $500M in backing from Haim Saban and a focus on developing international artists from LatAm and other regions, signed a global admin deal with Universal Music Publishing. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Wondery, the LA-based podcast studio, launched its own podcast streaming app. (Read more)
   
• iHeartMedia signed a deal with WarnerMedia to produce companion podcasts for HBO Max shows. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Treehouse Games, an LA-based game studio focused on collaborative games, raised $2.6M in seed funding from London Venture Partners (LVP), Transcend Fund, and Kristian Segestrale (CEO of Super Evil Megacorp). (Read more)
   
• Epic Games‘ portal for buying and playing PC games, the Epic Games Store, hit 61 million MAUs this past month. It sunk money into free give-aways of popular games to lure new users. (Read more)
  • By comparison, Valve’s Steam portal (the longtime market leader) had 91 million MAUs at the end of last year.
     
• Absolutely Games unveiled itself as a new UK-based studio led by serial gaming entrepreneur James Brooksby. Rebellion and Cedric Littardi provided seed funding. (Read more)
   
• Activision Blizzard and Tencent‘s Call of Duty: Mobile has had 250 million downloads since launching in October. (Read more)
   
• EA renewed an exclusivity deal with La Liga to include the Italian soccer league’s teams and players in the FIFA game franchise. (Read more)
   
• Unity made its full library of educational courses for learning how to use Unity free. (View here)

AR/VR

• Facebook acquired Ready at Dawn Studios, the VR studio behind the Lone Echo game franchise that has offices in Irvine, CA and Portland, OR. Its Facebook’s third acquisition of a VR studio in the last year. (Read more)
   
• Facebook is discontinuing production and support for the Oculus Go headset. (Read more)
  • As the first decent cordless VR headset, it marked an important stepping stone, but it was underwhelming in tech specs and content offerings. The newer Quest headset is the substantially improved update to Go.

Communications

• The European Commission released a two-year review of GDPR saying the data privacy law is working but there needs to be far more resources devoted to enforcing of it. (Read more)

Hi everyone – hope the week is kicking off well. 

Yesterday I published an article on Confronting Racial Bias in Video Games. Games are often overlooked in discussions of how media portrayals of different demographics affect real-world treatment of those groups.

The biggest problem within gaming is that the homogeneity of game companies’ teams often results in obliviousness to how non-White/Asian demographics are portrayed (or not portrayed) and not treating diversity as a business priority.

I featured a couple of the new game studios — Glow Up Games and Brass Lion Entertainment — that see the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx characters in games as a big business opportunity given the large % of gamers of those ethnicities. Gaming is behind Hollywood in waking up to the reality that diversity is about untapped markets in addition to being a moral and political issue.

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Microsoft is shutting down Mixer
Microsoft is abandoning its attempt to compete in the game live-streaming market, with the announcement today that its Twitch-competitor Mixer will shut down on July 22.

As part of a deal with Facebook, Mixer will redirect all users to Facebook Gaming thereafter. Top live-streamers on Mixer (“partners”) are automatically being made partners on Facebook Gaming and will receive the same deal terms they had with Mixer.

Mixer paid up to secure the top streamers exclusively to its platform — most notably its $20-30M deal with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins — but never amassed the consumer following to catch up with Amazon’s Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Facebook Gaming. That top tier of streamers are being freed from their contracts, so expect the remaining platforms in the space to make bids on new exclusive deals.

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Mediawan’s pan-European TV play

Mediawan announced it is acquiring the Spanish TV production studio Good Mood for an undisclosed sum and in the process of acquiring Lagardère’s production unit Lagardère Studios for up to €100M.

Paris-based Lagardère has been spinning off assets to focus entirely on its Publishing and Retail divisions, which are dominated by the book publisher Hachete and airport store chain Relay, respectively.

Mediawan was launched as a SPAC on the Paris stock exchange in 2015 by telco billionaire Xavier Niel, banker Matthieu Pigasse (then Lazard, now Centerview), and TV exec Pierre-Antoine Capton to roll up scripted TV production companies in Europe. Mediawan has acquired 23 companies since.

The founding trio also announced today that they are teaming up with insurer MACSF, which owns 7.8% of shares, and PE firm KKR to buy out the 73% of Mediawan shares they don’t already own via an entity called Mediawan Alliance. Mediawan Alliance will also take a minority stake in KKR portfolio company Leonine, a production/distribution company that has been running a similar strategy (at smaller scale) in Germany.

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Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• An Italian court rejected Vivendi‘s lawsuit to block Mediaset from merging its Italian and Spanish subsidiaries into one Dutch holding company called MediaForEurope. (Read more)
  • Mediaset founder (and former Italian Prime Minister) Silvio Berlusconi has been making a play to create a larger pan-European TV conglomerate that can better challenge Netflix and others. 
  • This was the latest in an ongoing drama of Vivendi and Mediaset suing each other. Vivendi took a minority stake in Mediaset and has tried to block the MediaForEurope strategy, arguing its just about the Berlusconi family increasing its % control over Mediaset assets.
     
• DAZN and Sky paid €4.4B for 4-year domestic broadcasting rights to Germany’s Bundesliga soccer league. It’s €200M less than the 4-year rights deal that expires after this season, suggesting DAZN and Sky expect the market to return post-Covid fairly swiftly, albeit not entirely. (Read more)
   
• Disney removed its 7-day free trial for Disney+, ahead of the release of the Hamilton Broadway recording. The demand to watch Hamilton should convert a lot of subscribers who would otherwise only stick around for the free trial to watch Hamilton. (Read more)
   
• Cineworld agreed to a new $250 million secured debt facility. (Read more)
   
• Weta Digital, the special effects industry leader based in Wellington NZ, is launching an animation division. (Read more)

Publishing

• The Local, a network of English-language news sites for expats in Europe, increased paying subscribers by 70% to 26,000 since Covid-19 lockdowns started in March.
  • Here’s a case study on the different ways the 11-person team is monetizing its 6-7M monthly unique visitors (which soared to 17M in March).
     
• BuzzFeed has been seeking a buyer for BuzzFeed Germany, and German trade pub Meedia reports that an investor group consisting of Markus Posset, Alexander Schütz, and Klemens Hallmann are making a bid. (Read more, in German)

Music

• Live Nation is dropping its artist guarantees by 20%, requiring artists to get their own concert insurance, and increasing the penalty for artists who cancel a concert, among other changes. (Read more)
   
• Live Nation is testing its first drive-in concert. (Read more)
   
• European digital distribution company Kontor New Media has acquired Germany-based punk, rock and metalcore label Arising Empire. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• SiriusXM bought podcast distributor and analytics platform Simplecast. (Read more)
   
• Spotify shares have been soaring over the last month. The company’s $43B market cap is $13B higher than in mid-May.
  • Investor confidence seems to be growing that Spotify can dominate the podcast market, a key priority for the Swedish company, which has signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan, DC Entertainment, and Kim Kardashian in the last month.
     
• Spotify is testing interactive podcast ads, with a visual ad appearing in-app alongside the audio ad so the advertiser can directly link to a site or share a promo code. (Read more)
  • Spotify also last week began rolling out video ads to its free tier users in the US, UK, and Canada. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Interactive Storytelling

• Twitch announced two of the interactive TV shows it is producing as part of its push to pioneer the format on its platform. (Read more)

Gaming

• DMarket, the LA-based marketplace for digital items from video games,raised $6.5M in Series A funding from Almaz Capital and Xsolla. It also announced EA founder Trip Hawkins as an independent board member. (Read more)
  • I wrote about DMarket in my March article on virtual economies.
     
• Riot Games announced there will be no skin trading built into its new hit game Valorant. This forces players to only buy directly from Riot. (Read more)
  • As explained in the same virtual economies article, this is standard in gaming still but dramatically limits the potential size of Valorant‘s economy and the money that could be earned from it. Think state-controlled economy vs. free markets. Game devs are wary of the liability and complexity that comes with a more open economy.
  • Many Valorant players will still trade skins, they’ll just do it via the grey market on other sites.
     
• Nintendo is pulling back its mobile games ambitions to keep its focus on growth of the Switch console following the massive success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (Read more)
   
• Blooper Team, the Polish studio behind Xbox exclusive game The Medium, is reportedly in acquisition talks with multiple US and European companies. (Read more)
   
• Polyient Games launched as an accelerator for blockchain-based gaming infrastructure startups. (Read more)

AR/VR

• Bose is shutting down its program to develop an audio-enhanced augmented reality platform for third-party developers. (Read more) 

Communications

• France’s Constitutional Council ruled that a new law requiring social media companies to take down illicit content within 24 hours of it posting is unconstitutional. (Read more)
   
• My TechCrunch colleagues compiled a reading list of articles to learn about Reliance Jio, India’s largest mobile carrier which has raised over $14B in the last month. (Read it here)
   
• A summary of news from Apple‘s annual WWDC event today: (Read it here)

Dealmakers

• The Information profiled Endeavor‘s challenges since it pulled its planned IPO last year. (Read it here)

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Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Tencent is reportedly exploring an acquisition of iQIYI, the Baidu-owned, Nasdaq-listed VOD service that has 119M subscribers (mainly in China). Tencent’s rival Tencent Video service has 112M paying subs. (Read more)
   
• Hydrow, the Boston-based startup providing a subscription video service of rowing workout videos alongside a rowing machine (think Peleton for rowing), raised an additional $25M in funding from L Catterton. (Read more)

Music

• Midia’s blog post on Tencent‘s music industry strategy: Read it here

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Epic Games‘ current fundraise is for $750M at a $17B valuation. (Read more)
  • GamesBeat reports Epic took in $400M in April revenue from Fortnite.

AR/VR

• Hulu is shutting down its VR app. (Read more)
   
• The Verge investigated “What’s left of Magic Leap“: Read it here

Communications

• The EU’s European Commission announced formal antitrust investigations into Apple over its App Store and Apple Pay. (Read more)
  • Spotify, among others, filed formal complaints against Apple last year and lobbied regulators to take action.

Dealmakers

• Lagardère, the Paris-based publishing and travel retail group that recently fended of activist investor Amber Capital, is looking to sell its live entertainment assets like Les Foiles Bergeres cabaret and several venues for €70M. (Read more)
   
• Kevin Durant, a star basketball play at the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, bought a 5% stake in the Philadelphia Union MLS soccer team with option to double his stake. (Read more)

This deal news was from today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This appeared in today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Cineworld, the UK-based cinema giant, is backing out of its $1.65B acquisition of Canadian cinema chain Cineplex. (Read more)

I wrote in this newsletter two years ago that cinema chains could be the basis for creating an “Amazon Prime of live entertainment”.

1. Seeking a better biz model, cinema chains would launch subscription memberships giving consumers access to free tickets and discounts on concessions, like AMC Stubs program.
2. These vertically integrated programs inevitably beat third-party ones like MoviePass (RIP) because they actually control the experience and have offer concession discounts (and deeper discounts). Plus the market is so concentrated that any consumer only has 1-3 options of cinema companies to go to…not much leverage for a third-party aggregator.
3. These subscriptions target casual movie-goers (1-5 visits per quarter) who would start attending more (and spending more on concession) as a result of the subscription. In order to expand to the much larger swath of people who only go to cinemas 2-5 times per year, they’ll have to bundle their subscriptions with other live entertainment options.
4. This bundle quickly becomes a competition to be the no-brainer membership to pay for in order to get discounts and special perks for whatever you and your friends want to do on a Friday or Saturday evening…tie-ins with other types of venues, with restaurant chains, with paintball or horseback riding or whatever else.

Amazon’s rumored interest in cinema chains while they are in desperate financial position during the Covid-19 crisis hints that they may see this too, with the additional reason that they could double cinemas as Amazon stores.

Cineplex is the most obvious company for an acquirer to test this thesis since it has 75% market share of Canada’s cinema market, has expanded into VR arcades, esports tournaments, and restaurant chains, and has 1/4 of all Canadian adults already in its free rewards program. It hasn’t launched a membership program yet or done enough to package its assets as one cohesive offering to consumers.

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Snap announced a bunch of new Originals and renewed content deals for its Snapchat Discover section. (Read more)
   
• WarnerMedia is simplifying its confusing portfolio of SVOD apps. HBO Go will be shut down and users moved into the new HBO Max app for free. HBO Now is being renamed simply HBO and will the app for users whose smart TV devices (Fire TV, Roku) don’t yet offer HBO Max. (Read more)
   
• Bain Capital is preparing a $3.4B bid for a ~25% stake in Serie A, Italy’s pro soccer league, according to Bloomberg. The focus is securing a cut of the leagues annual income from selling broadcasting rights. (Read more)
  • The offer competes with an existing one from CVC of $2B for ~20%.
  • Serie A revenue in 2018-19 season was $2.5B, 60% of it from broadcast rights.
  • Mediaset just filed an antitrust complaint in Italy against Sky Italia’s plans to broadcast Serie A matches on free-to-air TV rather than a subscription channel. (Read more)

Music

• Tencent did buy a $200M, 1.6% stake in Warner Music as part of Warner’s IPO. The negotiations had been reported at the time but not confirmed. (Read more)
   
• Tracklib, the Stockholm-based platform for music producers to legally and easily sample other songs, rasied $4.5M from Sony Innovation Fund. (Read more)
   
• The US music publishing market totaled $3.72B in 2019, up 11.6% yoy. It’s a stat that speaks to the growth investors like Hipgnosis, Shamrock, Kobalt Capital, and Round Hill have bet on with they aggressive buying up of publishing rights to hit songs the last few years. (Read more)
  • The US recording music industry was $7.3B in 2019, by comparison.
     
• The Norwegian government approved a data fraud investigation into streaming service Tidal. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Headspace, the subscription audio app for meditation and sleep, raised $47.7M in new funding. (Read more)
   
• Podyssey’s Podcast Deep Dives (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• AT&T is looking to selling Warner Bros Interactive, its gaming unit, for $2-4B. (Read more)
  • “Take-Two Interactive, Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard have all expressed interest” says CNBC
     
• Snap says 100M users have played a game on Snapchat since games launched in April 2019. (Read more)
   
• Kahoot!, the Oslo-based platform for user-generated educational games, raised $28M via private placement from existing VC backer Northzone. Another $62M in shares were sold in a secondaries transaction. (Read more)
  • Kahoot! is listed on Norway’s Merkur, a sort of partially public market, with a full IPO expected in 2021.
  • Current market cap: $1.4B // 2020 predicted revenue: $32-38M
     
• Playable Worlds, a San Diego-based studio building a cloud-native sandbox MMO, raised $10M in Series A funding from Galaxy Interactive and Bitkraft Esports Ventures. (Read more)
   
• A testing prototype of Ubisoft‘s forthcoming open-world game Gods and Monsters accidentally appeared for download on Google Stadia. (Read more)
   
• Playstation showcased its new Playstation 5 console, which will release around the holidays at the same time the Xbox Series X console launches. (Read more)
  • WaPo had a good post comparing the companies’ strategies. PS is playing a traditional game, focused on a slate of expansive games developed in-house, whereas Xbox is focused on breadth by expanding its subscription service.
     
• Niantic, the studio behind Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, has 10 games in development with a plan to release 2 new games per year. (Read more)
   
• EA announced a new Star Wars game called Star Wars: Squadrons. (Read more)
   
• Cloud Imperium Games, a West Hollywood-based game studio, surpassed $300M in crowdfunding for its Star Citizen. (Read more)
  • Star Citizen has been in development since 2011 and has had its public launch repeatedly delayed since 2014. Following an initial $2M Kickstarter in 2013, the team has continued to fundraise by pre-selling packages of digital goods that players will be able to use in the game. It hit $65M in 2014 and $200M in 2018.
  • There is no official release date for the game.
  • Here’s a Forbes story on the company a year ago.
     
• GamesBeat interview with Andrew Chen, the partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who leads gaming investments: Read it here

Someone asked me to clarify two terms I use near-daily in this gaming section: “open-world” means there is an expansive virtual world your character can wander around and do things in as you feel like…you’re not forced to stick strictly to certain missions in certain places. A “sandbox” game is a subset of that in which your character is specifically building and changing the virtual world…think Minecraft or Roblox.

AR/VR

• Snap now enables third-party developers who create augmented reality Snapchat filters via the Lens Studio tool to upload their own machine learning models. (Read more)

Communications

• Snap introduced Snap Minis, a way for third-parties to make small HTML5 apps that can be pulled up within Snapchat messaging. (Read more)
  • Featured apps include buying concert tickets through Atom and creating flashcards with Tembo.
     
• Ethyca, a startup for managing data privacy compliance, raised $13.5M in Series A funding. IA Ventures led the deal, alongside a long list of angel investors including Mike Ovitz. (Read more)
   
• Reliance Jio sold more shares in its Reliance Jio Platforms division that is the largest mobile carrier in India, this time to PE firms TPG ($600M) and L Catterton. (Read more)
  • It totals nearly $14B in deals (for 22% combined stake) in the last month with Facebook, Silver Lake, KKR, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Mubadala, and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• TV networks and SVOD services in the US are removing content that is seen as glorifying police violence (like COPS) or portraying slavery or racism in a positive like (like Gone With The Wind).

Publishing

• Facebook launched its dedicated news section of the Facebook app, called Facebook News, for all US users today. (Read more)
   
• NewsKKR informed the board of publishing giant Axel Springer that it plans to force of buy-out of remaining shareholders as part of its take-private of the company. (Read more – in German)
   
• Tucker Carlson, who hosts a primetime show on Fox News, sold his ~33% stake in The Daily Caller, the American conservative news site he co-founded, to his co-founder Neil Patel. (Read more)
   
• Digiday did a case study on how Bloomberg Media is reducing its subscriber churn rate. (Read more)

Music

• Wave, a startup whose platform hosts concerts within virtual worlds, raised $30M in Series B funding from Maveron, Griffin Gaming Partners, RRE Ventures, Upfront, Scooter Braun, and Alex Rodriguez. (Read more)
   
• Warner Music shares remain stable after the music group’s IPO last week. It’s currently trading around $31/share ($16B market cap), having started trading at $27 and finished its first day at $29

Podcasting/Audio

• Podhero launched as a podcast streaming app where users pay a $4.99 per month subscription, which is them divided among their favorite podcasts (at percentages they can set). (Read more)
  • This is from the creators of the podcast discover app Swoot.
  • Money allocated to podcast creators who haven’t created a Podhero account will remain available for them to claim whenever they sign up in the future.

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Unity, the game engine, has long been criticized for being quick to release new updates that are then buggy for many months, frustrating developers.
  • It announced it will now make the default Unity license a long-term supported (LTS) version which comes out annually and is supported for two years. (Read more)
  • Users who still want to frequent stream of new updates can opt into that but for most users those new features will just release as part of the next LTS version (after most bugs have been solved).
     
• Sensor Tower released data on the top grossing mobile games for the month of May. (Read more)
  Of note:
  • #1 PUBG, $226 million
  • #2 Honor of Kings, $204 million
  • #7 Pokemon Go, $82 million
     
• Sales of legally-bought game consoles are growing substantially in China, which has traditionally been much more of a PC and mobile market and where most consoles have typically been acquired through the gray market (consoles manufactured at Chinese factories for other markets but sold domestically under the table). (Read more)

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Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Boom.tv — whose live-streaming platform targets small, amateur esports tournament — raised $10M in Series A funding from Bitkraft Esports Ventures, Crest Capital, and Pole To Win. (Read more)
   
• Movie theaters in California are set to reopen (at 25% capacity) on June 12.

Publishing

• Digiday reports that US and European publishers are bracing for a second wave of layoffs. (Read more)
   
• Vogue profiled Roula Khalaf, new editor of the Financial Times. (Read more)

Music

• Kiswe Mobile, a high-end event live-streaming platform based in New Jersey, announced a broad partnership with Big Hit Entertainment, the record label behind K-Pop group BTS. (Read more)
   
• SiriusXM announced a $1.5B debt offering (4.125% Senior Notes due 2030). (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Twitch is receiving a massive surge of legal takedown requests for clips that contain background music, going back through 2017. It caught Twitch and Twitch users off guard, with numerous popular accounts now threatened with permanent bans based on Twitch’s 3-strike rule. (Read more)
  • Twitch is trying to work with creators through the problem, but appears to also be advising many to delete their entire catalog of past videos.
  • Twitch doesn’t offer a way to bulk delete videos, forcing creators to delete videos one by one. (Many creators have thousands of clips.)
     
• Kalypso Media Group, the Germany-based game publisher, acquired the remaining 40% of Gaming Minds Studios (creator of Railway Empire) it didn’t already own. (Read more)

Communications

• Reliance Jio Platforms sold a 1.16% stake to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for $750M. It’s the latest in a wave of new investors in India’s top mobile carrier, following deals with Facebook, Silver Lake, KKR, and Mubdala. (Read more)
   
• The US Senate‘s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a bipartisan report warning the US government to do more to block Chinese influence over US telecom infrastructure. (Read it here)

Hi everyone – a very quiet Friday for media deals today. Take care this weekend!

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Mediaset, the Italian TV giant, is demanding Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1 commit to a plan to grow its core TV business at next week’s shareholder meeting. (Read more)
  • ProSieben spent the last several years focused on developing its Nucom holdings in e-commerce and consumer apps. With a change in CEO in March after weak financial performance, the company stated a return to focusing on its core entertainment business.
  • Mediaset, which has built just under a 25% stake in ProSieben, has become an outspoken critic of the company not acting aggressively enough. 
  • Here’s a blog post by one investor predicting Mediaset and KKR (the PE firm that co-owned Prosieben from 2006 to 2013 and just bought a 5% stake in it again) will team up to takeover Prosieben, and sell the Nucom division to Axel Springer (the German publishing conglomerate KKR just took private). There’s big question of whether German regulators would allow that though.
     
• Disney is including Hulu in its pitch to TV advertisers at the upfronts this year. It’s also touting a new ad platform Disney Hulu XP that allows brands to make one purchase of advertising across all of Disney’s digital properties. (Read more)

Publishing

• Bytedance is shutting down TopBuzz, the international version of its enormously popular Jinri Toutiao social news aggregation app in China. TopBuzz once reached 40M MAUs but faded over the last several years. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Play One Up raised $3.1 million in seed funds from Three Curve Capital. The Ohio-based startup enables gamers to make wagers on the outcomes of their games within Madden NFL, NBA2K, FIFA, Fortnite, etc. and takes a 15% fee. (Read more)

Communications

• Reliance Jio Platforms, India’s leading telecom (in which both Facebook and KKR made large investments last month), is selling a 1.85% stake to UAE sovereign fund Mubadala for $1.2 billion. (Read more)

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Hi everyone – I got a late start today, so pardon the nighttime newsletter.

I enjoyed this NYT profile of Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s Global Creative Director. He is one of the best interviewers in all of media, in my opinion. His long-form interviews make you feel like you’re a fly on the wall as two friends have a deep, honest conversation about how and why the artist crafted each song and where they are mentally in life right now.

Recommended Read: Supercell analysis
I came across this strong, detailed analysis of Supercell by the hosts of the Deconstructors of Fun podcast, outlining the mechanics of Supercell’s games, the company’s growth strategy, and their recommendations on how to gain new momentum since new releases over the last 3 years haven’t overcome declining popularity in the overall portfolio.

Supercell is the gold standard of mobile games studios. All 5 of its games — Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars — rank among the highest grossing mobile games of all time.

The Helsinki-based, Tencent-owned company employs just 320 people with annual revenue of ~$1.6B and pre-tax profits of $600M. (Fun fact: 2016 data showed 7 of the 10 highest paid people in Finland were Supercell employees).

Read their post

Interesting Deals, Stats, & Product Updates

Digestible Media

Film/TV/Video 

• Quibi is implementing 10% pay cuts for executives. It denies a WSJ report that its planning layoffs. (Read more)

Publishing

• DAZN Group, the company behind the sports-focused SVOD platform DAZN, is reportedly selling the soccer news website Goal.com to TPG for around $125M. (Read more)
  • DAZN has been in need of money with sports shut down, and given its hefty losses even before Covid-19 as it bought up streaming rights from sports leagues.
  • DAZN is owned by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, which yesterday cashed in $1.9B of its controlling stake in Warner Media via IPO.
     
• Facebook announced it is prohibiting state-owned media companies from advertising on its platforms in the US. It will also label their posts as state media. (Read more)
  • It’s a positive step in helping users recognize propoganda, albeit a small dent in the much larger ecosystem of bots and unofficial state propoganda.
  • Defining which outlets count for this is a big grey area. Arguably any media outlet based in an authoritarian country that censors and threatens media is acting as an arm of the state even if they aren’t owned by the state.
     
• Medium launched a Newsletters feature for those with publications on Medium. Potential subscribers have to create a Medium account in order to subscribe to your newsletter, however, and — based on my creation of a newsletter to test this — doesn’t seem to give you access to your subscribers’ email addresses. Avoid this feature. (Read more)

Podcasting/Audio

• Edison Research released its annual Infinite Dial Canada report, with survey results tracking market growth and market shares in Canada for smart speakers, podcasting, music streaming, and radio. (Read more)

Interactive Media

Gaming

• Survey results: percent of kids age 4-14 in the US and UK who play Roblox (🇺🇸 54%, 🇬🇧 51%) and Minecraft (🇺🇸 31%, 🇬🇧 23%). (Read more)
   
• Playrix, a Dublin-based mobile and PC studio behind Gardenscapes, is acquiring the Croatian point-and-click adventure PC games studio Cateia Games. Cateia’s 40-person team will rebrand as Playrix Croatia. (Read more)
   
• Rovio acquired mobile studio Darkfire Games for an undisclosed price and is rebranding it Rovio Copenhagen. (Read more)
   
• Unity Technologies, the most-used game engine in the world (and one of two that dominate the market, alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine), has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to prep an IPO for late this year. (Read more)
  • I spent a lot of time with Unity’s exec team and founders last year. Here’s my article about the rise of the company: How Unity built the world’s most popular game engine 
  • In Q1 2019 there were reports that Unity was targeting a Q1 2020 IPO. It raised more private funding instead, and may have been delayed by a sexual harassment lawsuit in the summer.
  • Unity dominates in mobile games and AR/VR, Unreal is more popular in console & PC. Both are expanding into 3D design use cases in architecture, engineering, auto design, and Hollywood virtual production.
     
• Epic Games signed a deal with Sega and The Creative Assembly to release A Total War Saga: Troy exclusively through the Epic Games Store for the first year. (Read more)
  • A Total War Saga: Troy is the latest offshoot of the popular Total War franchise.
  • Unusual strategy: the game will be free for the first 24 hours, meaning anyone who downloads it then can keep it forever without paying.
     
• Two shareholder advisory firms recommended pension funds vote against Activision Blizzard‘s proposed executive compensation scheme, criticizing CEO Bobby Kotick’s bonus structure and overall comp relative to performance. (Read more)

Communications

• Amazon is reportedly in talks with Bharti Airtel, the 3rd largest telecom in India, about purchasing a 5% stake (for around $2B). (Read more)
  • It follows Facebook’s investment in Reliance Jio Platforms to challenge Amazon’s e-commerce efforts in India, and Google’s reported investment talks with Vodafone Idea (the 2nd largest telecom).
     
• Twitter usage is soaring in the US during nationwide protests. (Read more)

Dealmakers

• Paradigm (the fourth largest Hollywood talent agency after WME-IMG, CAA, and UTA) took on additional investment from Crescent Drive Media, which is owned by Platinum Equity founder Tom Gores (aka brother of Paradigm CEO Sam Gores). (Read more)
  • All the agencies have been suffering serious financial losses due to the Covid-19 lockdown halting sports leagues, Hollywood productions, and concerts.
     
• Forbes released its annual list of highest paid celebrities, although its lacking in methodology. It seems to go by top-line revenue for concerts etc. so the earnings of the celebrity as a brand not as an individual. (Here’s the list)